CES this year sure was an exciting show, but the product that interested me the most was the HP mini 1000 Mi Edition. I have been very happy with my computing combination of iMac and iPhone, but lately I have been traveling around a lot more, and it would be nice to have a small laptop to surf the web with. What I like about the HP is the fact that it is very small (only 1″ thin and 2.25 lbs), but with a reasonable sized keyboard (92% of full size), it runs on linux, and the price starts at $329!
I don’t think after being such a hard core apple user that I could go back to windows even for a small netbook so I am happy that HP is giving consumers the opportunity to try a new OS. But I still find myself scratching my head, where is Apple on this?
It would appear that there are two arguments in the “where is the Apple netbook” debate.
#1 The macbook air is as close as apple is going to get to a netbook, it’s small and portable, yet powerful enough for apple to sell it.
#2 The iPhone and iPod Touch are Apple’s versions of a portable internet browsing device.
Now while these both seem like good arguments, I still don’t buy it. I don’t think Apple is trying to get into the netbook game because they have stated that they can’t build a computer for less than $1000 and be happy with it. Now while the Macbook Air is very portable, it is also very expensive. And while the iPhone has good internet capabilities, it doesn’t match the kind of work I can get done when I have a keyboard and a webcam.
These factors are really making me lean toward the HP. Apple give me a break on this, I would gladly pay $600 for an Apple netbook than ran OSX, just throw me a bone here.
What would you do? And how do you feel about the whole netbook catergory of laptops?